None of us seem to be able to avoid ‘labels’ - being put into boxes that have become a short-form way of explaining who we are, how we think.... what our hopes and dreams might be.

But like all of you here tonight I am much more than the sum of my parts.

No group is more stereotyped in Australia than refugees. The word ‘refugee’ invokes so much emotion, that it’s almost impossible to utter the word without immediately polarising your audience.

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As Australia’s treatment of refugees and asylum seekers takes us into our darkest days since the White Australia policy, I’ve been questioning my values and the values of the country I have called home since my family migrated here almost 40 years ago.

I thought I knew it well this Great Southern Land of ours – from its eucalypts and bush rock, to its footy ovals and cricket pitches, from its meat pies and kebabs, to its sun, surf and zinc cream.

These days I’m not so sure.

The Australia I see reflected in the media, on the floor of our national parliament, on the world stage, looks more foreign to me every day.

Tonight I want to explore some of the issues I believe have brought us to the moral impoverishment of our current refugee and asylum seeker policy and how we might begin navigating our way through the current hysteria to a more humane, compassionate and thoughtful approach.

Firstly, I’d like to give you some insights into my perspective.

This is me. One of the earliest photos I have of myself. I’m about a year old - and those who know me well would say my mood hasn’t improved much since! The arrival of a new baby is usually met with great joy. My parents should have been imagining all sorts of exciting things for my future. But they already knew precisely the way my life would unfold.

You see I was born an Indian girl in Apartheid South Africa in 1968. As a fifth-generation South African Indian, I was destined to live a life where everything I did would be dictated by my gender and the colour of my skin.

As a non-white citizen, the state would determine where I lived, where I went to school, what park benches I could sit on, which beaches I could swim at, who I could marry and where I would be buried. A life of dehumanising discrimination lay ahead for me.

But fate intervened and gave me courageous parents who decided to leave South Africa, their family and all they knew to find a new home for their growing family.

In fact when we left, my parents had to actually smuggle me across the South African border into Zambia because at the time it was illegal for non-white children to leave South Africa.

My mother still talks of her terror as I slept soundly in the back seat covered by blankets as South African border guards prodded the bundles on top of me with their rifle butts.

My parents' search for a new home took me and my two younger sisters on an extraordinary 16-year adventure across five countries straddling three continents, 12 homes, six schools. The only thing that remained constant – and possibly not accidental if you know my family – is that every country we migrated to was obsessed with cricket!

From South Africa we went to Zambia, then England, then Tasmania, then back to Africa to Zimbabwe and finally back to Australia to South Australia.

In our search for a new home we crossed paths with hundreds of people who were doing the same thing at airports, at railway stations, at ports, and at border checkpoints: people looking for a safe place where they could bring up their families.

Most of these people would never have left their homes if they could have built a good, safe life where they were born.

We conveniently categorise people into economic migrants, migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers but the reality is most people permanently leave their homeland reluctantly.

It’s only a privileged few who choose when they leave, how they leave, where they go and if they come back. My parents’ professional qualifications and English-speaking skills gave them more choices than most. In the global labour market of the 1970s they were in demand – particularly my father’s dental skills.

When the Whitlam government came to power in 1972 we were living in England and having a pretty tough time of it like many of the waves of Eastern European and South-East Asian immigrants. My father's dental qualifications, gained in India, weren't recognised by British authorities and he had to re-sit the last part of his degree again.

Our family was struggling financially and when Gough Whitlam introduced his Assisted Passage Migration Scheme, which provided financial assistance to new migrants, my parents didn’t hesitate. With my father's professional qualification our entire family would be resettled in Australia with a house and job.

This is how we found ourselves in 1974 in the tiny country town of St Mary's on the rugged east coast of Tasmania. Population? 20,000 kangaroos and 400 people, give or take a few.

St Mary's was a sleepy little hamlet. Most of the townsfolk were fourth- and fifth-generation Tasmanians with a few newly-arrived Eastern European immigrants. The indigenous population had been decimated and there was little Asian immigration which up until then had been directed towards the major mainland cities. So our arrival in the hamlet was certain to cause a stir.

What my parents didn't expect given the racism they had experienced in South Africa and England was the rock star welcome we would receive.

To the townsfolk of St Mary's we were exotic and novel. The town’s local socialite – the bus driver’s wife - arranged an afternoon tea for my mother and my sisters to meet the other families. They were all dressed in their finery - some even wearing hats with flowers. They'd prepared these exotic delicacies we'd never seen before: lamingtons, butterfly cupcakes, fairy bread. We were greeted in a line as if we were the royal family, everyone taking turns to shake our hands.

I remember it well. I was six years old. One little girl even asked if she could touch my skin. She'd never seen dark skin before. She was fascinated. Of course we all had British accents as well so we must have seemed very odd!

We were so welcomed by that town. We were made to feel so included and special. Children wanted to sit next to us in class. We were invited to weekend BBQs and fishing trips.

That sense of specialness bestowed on us by the people of St Mary’s has stayed with me ever since. I know my experience contrasts vastly to the mixed or lukewarm welcome many immigrants can receive. Why were the townsfolk of St Mary’s so open and accepting?

Some would argue that my family was treated differently because we came via the ‘proper channels’ - we weren’t ‘queue jumpers’, we weren’t ‘illegals’, we arrived on a plane with a visa and went through immigration and customs.

But of course the people of St Mary’s didn’t care how we had arrived. We were part of the community making a contribution. And they knew how difficult it was to get a good dentist in a rural town. Sadly something that’s still difficult to do. They showed us compassion and empathy. They wanted to get to know us as individuals, to find the commonalities, to learn about our experiences.

After all this was 1974. Television hadn’t yet brought the worst of the world’s stereotypes and fears into their lounge rooms. 9/11 was still three decades away. The people of St Mary’s didn’t have many pre-conceived ideas of what someone from South Africa ‘was like’ or what ‘God’ an Indian person would worship. And if they did they just wanted to get to know us.

Personal contact will temper most of the prejudices we can fall prey to. If you want to kill compassion and demonise difference, segregate people. It’s what Apartheid South Africa did so effectively. It’s what Australia is doing now by putting asylum seekers - including children - behind razor wire thousands of miles offshore removed from the Australian community.

My family soon got a dose of life away from the protection and privilege of Australia when, eight years after we arrived in Tasmania, my parents decided to move back to Africa to Zimbabwe in the early 1980s. Yes - as well as being courageous my parents are a little nutty. They wanted to be closer to their family in South Africa, they thought their professional skills would come in handy in the fledgling nation and they wanted to give their children a taste of Africa.

All admirable goals but when we arrived in the central town of Gweru, Zimbabwe was still healing from a vicious civil war.

I was 13 years old. We got a front row seat to war, conflict, racial upheaval - some of it played out in the school playground. It very quickly became apparent that Prime Minister Robert Mugabe was going to be no Nelson Mandela. He began an ethnic cleansing campaign against the minority Ndebele people, took control of the media and the army and set up one of the most blood-thirsty regimes Africa has ever seen.

As food and petrol shortages swept the country there was a mad scramble to leave. Some of our school friends and their families fled to South Africa and Botswana, a lucky few made it to Great Britain, and our family was able to escape back to paradise because we possessed a little piece of paper - an Australian passport.

I’d never understood the preciousness of my citizenship and nationality more so than on that day, as a sixteen-year-old, when we boarded a plane back to Australia via South Africa. I saw why some people risk everything to one day be cloaked under its protection.

Given my experiences and my background it wasn’t surprising that I would build a career in journalism. What did surprise me were the sorts of students I met in my journalism course. They were mostly from Anglo, English-speaking, middle-class, private school backgrounds. I was the only non-white student in my graduation year of 33 students. And really for the rest of my career in broadcast journalism in Australia that was to be the statistical mix I would encounter.

Even when I moved to SBS, our multicultural network, to anchor the Late News in the late 1990s, I was the only non-European person on my team. While the mix has changed slightly in the past 20 years, Australia’s media is still dominated by journalists from Anglo, English-speaking backgrounds.

This cultural imbalance has been one of the reasons I believe we get a skewed media view of the refugee debate in Australia. It’s much easier to frame the debate as ‘us’ and ‘them’ when you don’t look much like ‘them’. Many people in the mainstream media simply can’t relate to refugees, and lack the cultural awareness to empathise with their experiences. Sometimes, rather than connecting you, seeing the world only through a camera lens can put an enormous gulf between you and your subject.

Of course there are media outlets – mainly at the ABC and SBS and a few press outlets – that give refugee issues balance and deeper analysis.

Often they do so at their peril. Critical assessments of government policy can lead to threats of funding cuts - as we’re witnessing at the moment - or unrelenting campaigns, public pillory and accusations of left-wing bias from conservative media outlets.

Cuts to public broadcasting have also limited the time and resources journalists can spend investigating refugee and asylum seeker issues. The journalists and editors who continue to pursue this story are courageous and to be applauded.

But as Australia’s traditional media industry contracts and more news services are axed many journalists are forced to find work elsewhere. The ranks of public relations firms and government spin doctors inevitably swell. Some are then employed to pump out more anti-refugee sentiment.

It was revealed last year that the previous Gillard government engaged 72 media advisers and communication staff in the Immigration and Health departments alone. The total staff employed in public affairs was five times the number of journalists and staff employed in the entire Canberra press gallery.

And the spin doctors are achieving their goal. The dehumanisation of refugees is complete when a young vulnerable soul under our protection is killed in one of our facilities and the national outrage is barely audible.

Four months after Reza Berati’s death on Manus Island, an investigation and an ongoing Senate inquiry later, and the Australian public still doesn’t know the details of who killed Reza and how it happened.

We took away Reza’s hope and then we took away his future. Can there be a greater stain on our national soul?

Why are those fleeing their homes now locked up indefinitely like criminals with no charge in prisons we euphemistically call ‘detention centres’? ‘Detention’ is a short-term punishment you give naughty children who haven’t done their homework. ‘Detention’ is one of the many weasel words we have corrupted to hide our inhumanity.

From the most recent figures from the Australian Human Rights Commission, there are currently 5,867 people locked away in Australia’s 21 immigration detention facilities. 1,006 of them are children. 3,391 people are a little better off in community detention and 1,631 of these are children. 119 people have been in detention for over two years. Two years of traumatic incarceration to add to the untold horrors they have fled.

And what our political leaders and the shock jocks won’t tell you is that 90 per cent of asylum seekers who arrive by boat are found to be refugees.

So, we’ve spent almost $3 billion this financial year on Temporary Protection Visas, mandatory detention, migration excision zones, and offshore processing arrangements with Nauru and Papua New Guinea to persecute vulnerable people who - in the end - are found to be, mostly, genuine refugees.

And on top of this it was revealed last week that the Immigration Department is paying asylum seekers $10,000 each to voluntarily return to the tormentors and bullets they have fled.

And this is all held up as sound economic management?

Once a human rights defender, Australia is now being condemned internationally as a pariah. The United Nations Human Rights Committee has repeatedly found Australia to be in breach of its obligations under Article 9 (Section 1) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Our problem is not refugees.

Our problem is the fear industry that has been allowed to grow and profit from exploiting refugees.

This industry includes the politicians who use refugee-bashing as an easy way to get re-elected, it includes the well-paid newspaper columnists with little compassion or cleverness to talk about the complexities of the issue, it includes the media shock jocks who use their loud megaphones to bully the moderate voices and incite the extreme ones, and it includes an inattentive public who would prefer to talk about real estate, renovations and recipes.

Despite what we are constantly told our refugee numbers are small.

In 2012 a total of 17,202 asylum seekers on 278 boats arrived in Australia. By mid-last year 14,000 people had made it to our shores. While significant, the reality is that Australia still receives less than two per cent of the 50 million people fleeing persecution, conflict and war across the world. Less than two per cent.

Let me put this into context. Lebanon, for instance, has taken in almost one million refugees mainly from the Syrian Civil War. It only has a population of 4.5 million people, so these refugee numbers pose a grave threat to its stability, but it still keeps its borders open.

While our refugee intake is tiny in comparison, my concern is that with the growing challenges climate change will place on our fragile world, Australia will face in the near future an influx from ‘climate change’ refugees in our region.

And unless we can begin formulating a sensible policy based on ethics - about refugees and about climate change – we will encounter a very real humanitarian crisis we will be ill-equipped to deal with.

Just in the past year typhoons and cyclones have hit low-lying parts of the Philippines, India and Bangladesh leaving millions homeless.

And we already know how vulnerable many of our Pacific neighbours are to rising sea levels. Some communities in the Pacific and South-East Asia will be forced to relocate to safer regions, and Australia will be one of the obvious destinations.

Interestingly under the wording of the UN’s pre-climate change 1951 Convention on the Rights of Refugees, people fleeing natural disasters are currently not classified as refugees. No doubt this definition will need to be revisited.

Australia is the most climate-change-at-risk developed nation on the planet. Throwing more money at border patrols or border protection will not save us from a changing climate. ‘Border Protection’ will not stop climate change. ‘Borders’ aren’t real. They are not a force of nature like gravity. They are man-made. They are artificial constructs that can be redrawn, absorbed, extended or extinguished in a nanosecond by a red pen in a distant office, or by a tank in a battlefield. It’s happening right now in The Ukraine as I speak.

Asylum seekers pose no threat to our borders.

While we obsess with ‘turning back the boats’ the real menace to our way of life has already arrived in our atmosphere, unchecked, moving freely and it gets harder to turn back every day we keep ignoring it.

Let’s concentrate our efforts on turning back climate change.

It is time we closed our off-shore processing centres in Nauru and Manus Island.

It is time we ended mandatory detention.

It is an inhumane and expensive policy that does no-one any good.

It is a policy that breaches Australia’s international obligations and persecutes the very people we have committed ourselves to protecting.

We’re diminished as a nation every day we allow it to continue.

Detention in these facilities is unlimited and arbitrary and those detained are denied legal aid and avenues to challenge their detention in a court of law.

The Australian Human Rights Commission has found that our detention facilities ‘inflicted serious psychological harm’ on detainees that amounted to ‘cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment’.

The Commission recommended that a person should be detained only if they are individually assessed as posing an unacceptable risk to the Australian community and if that risk could not be met in a '‘less restrictive way’'. Asylum seekers should be permitted to reside in the community while their immigration status is resolved.

This can be achieved through the use of community detention or with bridging visas. This is happening at the moment for some detainees and is working very well. They should also have a right to pursue paid work which will give them some dignity. Community detention and bridging visas are both alternatives that allow for the wider community to be protected from identified risks while ensuring at the same time that people are treated humanely and in line with internationally accepted human rights standards.

Australia needs to reset its moral compass.

We know there are no queues for these people to jump.

We know there is no such person as an ''illegal''. Everyone has the legal right to seek asylum.

If we turn back the boats at our borders, their occupants could possibly die somewhere else due to our intervention. They may not die within our borders but is this still not something we should feel a responsibility for? Of course we should. It is heartless to feel otherwise.

We should refocus our resources on resolving the issues which force refugees to flee their homes and undertake risky journeys in the first place.

In places such as Afghanistan and Iraq where we contributed to the war we have a duty to contribute to the peace.

We should use our influence with countries such as Sri Lanka to curb its human rights abuses, not make excuses for them.

We must redouble our efforts to work more closely with Indonesia and Malaysia and the UNHCR in the processing and resettlement of refugees.

Australia needs to resume its moral leadership in the region rather than bullying poor nations such as Cambodia and Papua New Guinea into doing our dirty work for us.

The Dalia Lama showed his great insight when he said that compassion is the radicalism of our times.

To show compassion publicly on this issue takes great courage. It is to step outside the mainstream. It is to swim against the tide.

We are attacked and condemned for showing kindness even though that is what we teach our children to display in the playground.

All too often we see a chilling coldness in the eyes of a politician explaining on the news why some people are more equal than others. Getting rid of national debt seems to justify every abuse. We may eradicate debt but don’t we risk replacing it with a new moral bankruptcy?

Our fear of boat arrivals is nothing new. In fact, it can be argued that since the first boat people came here on the First Fleet, boat arrivals have occupied a paranoia in our national psyche that few other fears have.

I’ve often wondered why, when the perceived threat has never matched the reality - and when those who arrive by plane and overstay their visas far exceed boat arrivals in numbers.

Recently a philosopher at Deakin University, Patrick Stokes, offered a theory that I do find compelling. He argues that boat arrivals remind us that we haven’t earnt what we have. Our prosperity rests on happy accident rather than cosmic justice.

Just as we took this land illegally from the First Australians we subconsciously fear that someone will come along and take it from us. John Howard’s now infamous declaration - ‘'We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come'’ - comes from a frightened place of deep insecurity.

The emphasis is on sovereignty not on mercy: ‘If I don’t defend my patch someone will take it away’.

While the truer reality is that while we fight over borders and sovereignty, and who we let in and who we don’t, climate change is stealing our future away from us inch by inch.

I am very blessed and very proud to be an Australian but I am also a global citizen.

I have an allegiance to this planet as well.

When we talk only about our world in terms of borders, and countries, and nationalities, cultures and religions, all we’re doing is creating damaging divisions when we should be strengthening our shared humanity.

People often ask me where I’m from or where I consider ‘home’ to be, given my nomadic childhood.

This is my home. This is our home. Let’s start a new conversation.

This is a transcript of the 2014 Walter Lippmann Memorial Lecture by journalist and writer Indira Naidoo.